Hello and welcome to Outside Thought.  Thank you for visiting. I’m Karen Smith.

Outside Thought brings together my experience and professional practices of mindfulness, reflection, facilitation, coaching, walking, outdoors and creativity, to work with you.

I facilitate you to reflect on your practice, your creative health, and your wellbeing. Individually or as a team.

Work with me to reflect, celebrate, explore, develop, plan, consider, meditate, or simply be.

This is a fledgling website, a work in progress. Please do look on its imperfections gently and generously.

Since 1987 I have walked, talked, listened, coached, reflected, meditated, researched, conjectured, created, and facilitated work outside, in many places and spaces.

I am curious as to how paying attention through reflection allows us to find pathways towards our hopes and dreams and to explore our challenges, expectations, and assumptions, and what might be holding us back. Sometimes we need to work through challenges, sometimes we need to take a pause and celebrate and simply be. Sometimes having an external person who is totally focused on your development and practice can create momentum and transformation which is so difficult to achieve on one’s own. 

By creating moments of collaboration with the land and living beings around us, the mental and physical moves we make can become a place of possibility, for deepening understanding, of ourselves, of our connections, of other beings, of our work. We can also become more grounded and achieve spaciousness in our exploration of ourselves and our thinking.

I believe human beings have great expressive capacity, and that is important for self discovery. How do we think about ourselves through a kinder lens, and allow that to infuse our challenges in our work and in our lives? 

I believe working outside brings us back into being with the world. I am curious as to how nature work, embodying our thoughts, dreams, expectations, paying attention, offers up a different proposition for exploration and curiosity and sometimes just simply being.   

Testimonials

Karen is very skilled. I loved our outside thinking session. It was stimulating, supportive, challenging, very helpful. And good fun too.

N, Project Developer

My experience in an Outside Thought session with Karen was exquisite. Being in and above the woods, meant there was so much around us to help me think. The river, the valley bottom, the deer that we encountered, the bluebells and the hawthorn trees helped me piece together what I needed to focus on for my own ongoing wellbeing. I felt totally safe with and deeply heard by Karen, who asked just the right questions at the right time. I left feeling that my senses were buzzing, and my head was clear and the images from that session stay with me. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

Sara Robinson

I wanted to say again a huge thank you from all of us here at The Reader for your care and thought during our coaching and ‘thinking’ day(s) with you over the past few weeks. Everyone has said how much they’ve gained, that they have a new sense of clarity on next steps and felt really supported in their one-to-one sessions with you. All of this I can feel we’ve taken into our work since, coming together as a team in a renewed way.

Head of Shared Reading Programmes, The Reader, 2022

Karen’s questions were spot on. She picked out some of the real crucial things I was struggling with. I had a strong realisation about what was missing which Karen spotted really well and pushed me a couple of times, not too hard though, out of my comfort zone. Karen’s reflections back were also very useful and she signposted me to techniques and tools to further my own enquiry.

C, Coaching Client, Spring 2022.

I began walking with Karen to support the work I was doing to develop a new project and make sense of some conflicting tensions in my work. Going exploring with Karen has provided a welcome opportunity to draw creatively on all my capacities to notice and to learn. Sometimes our work together has been analytical and critically-engaged, sometimes intuitive and playful, sometimes embodied and wordless. Every part of it has been valuable in enabling me to reach a key decision point with clarity about how I arrived here and with confidence in my next steps moving forward.

E, Artist Maker

I have worked with Karen several times in her capacity as facilitator, trainer and business development guru, from the perspective of being a participant in a local authority planning day, recipient of training about going freelance and, most recently, as initiator of a visioning day for an independent creative business. I know when Karen is leading the session, it will be creative, inspiring and fun, as well as practical, thorough and grounded in reality. She helps those present to get a handle on the thorny issues, dream, push forward and make plans. Working with her is always a sound investment.’ 

Naomi Wilds, Producer, Adverse Camber